"Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to setup or manage, and you can start analyzing data immediately. You don’t even need to load your data into Athena, it works directly with data stored in S3. To get started, just log into the Athena Management Console, define your schema, and start querying.

Amazon Athena uses Presto with full standard SQL support and works with a variety of standard data formats, including CSV, JSON, ORC, Apache Parquet and Avro. While Amazon Athena is ideal for quick, ad-hoc querying and integrates with Amazon QuickSight for easy visualization, it can also handle complex analysis, including large joins, window functions, and arrays.Amazon Athena helps you analyze data stored in Amazon S3."What is Presto? – Amazon Web Services (AWS)Presto | Distributed SQL Query Engine for Big Data"Presto is an open source distributed SQL query engine for running interactive analytic queries against data sources of all sizes ranging from gigabytes to petabytes."

"The most energy-efficient car in America isn’t a Tesla, Toyota, or even the remarkable Chevrolet Bolt. It’s a Hyundai. With a range of 200 kilometers (124 miles), the all-electric Ioniq comes nowhere near the Bolt’s astounding 383 km (238 miles). But the Hyundai’s gasoline equivalent of 1.73 liters per 100 kilometers (136 mpge) tops all current EVs....Ioniqs match the slippery 0.24 drag coefficient of the Tesla Model S, making them the most aerodynamic models on U.S. roads....Hyundai is experimenting in California with a way to lure buyers from conventional cars: a cellphone-style subscription plan. It bundles unlimited mileage, charging costs, scheduled maintenance, and replacement of worn-out items into a single monthly payment."The New Ioniq - One Car Three Options | HyundaiUSA

Monday, March 27, 2017

"Terraform is a tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. Terraform can manage existing and popular service providers as well as custom in-house solutions.

Configuration files describe to Terraform the components needed to run a single application or your entire datacenter. Terraform generates an execution plan describing what it will do to reach the desired state, and then executes it to build the described infrastructure. As the configuration changes, Terraform is able to determine what changed and create incremental execution plans which can be applied.

The infrastructure Terraform can manage includes low-level components such as compute instances, storage, and networking, as well as high-level components such as DNS entries, SaaS features, etc."

"Bjorn Lomborg does cost/benefit analysis on global good. There are surprises when you examine what are the highest-yield targets in the domains of health, poverty, education, reduced violence, gender equality, climate change, biodiversity, and good governance."

Monday, March 20, 2017

Kako su izgledali sajtovi pre 20 godina? | PC Press (in Serbian language)
21+ years ago I wrote a simple "web crawler" tool,
to help download web pages of then popular web sites
to be added to a CD that was included with popular book "Internet" that I co-authored. Thanks to Dragan Vecerina who tirelessly managed and used then quite unreliable network connections we did download many of those sites, way before Google even existed... Good times...

"A thing shadow (sometimes referred to as a device shadow) is a JSON document that is used to store and retrieve current state information for a thing (device, app, and so on). The Thing Shadows service maintains a thing shadow for each thing you connect to AWS IoT. You can use thing shadows to get and set the state of a thing over MQTT or HTTP, regardless of whether the thing is connected to the Internet. Each thing shadow is uniquely identified by its name."

"AWS IoT provides a thing registry that helps you manage your things. A thing is a representation of a specific device or logical entity. It can be a physical device or sensor (for example, a light bulb or a switch on a wall). It can also be a logical entity like an instance of an application or physical entity that does not connect to AWS IoT but is related to other devices that do (for example, a car that has engine sensors or a control panel)."

“The HGX-1 hyperscale GPU accelerator will do for AI cloud computing what the ATX standard did to make PCs pervasive today. It will enable cloud-service providers to easily adopt NVIDIA GPUs to meet surging demand for AI computing.”

"About this course: Mindshift is designed to help boost your career and life in today’s fast-paced learning environment. Whatever your age or stage, Mindshift teaches you essentials such as how to get the most out of online learning and MOOCs, how to seek out and work with mentors, the secrets to avoiding career ruts (and catastrophes) and general ruts in life, and insights such as the value of selective ignorance over general competence. We’ll provide practical insights from science about how to learn and change effectively even in maturity, and we’ll build on what you already know to take your life’s learning in fantastic new directions. This course is designed to show you how to look at what you’re learning, and your place in what’s unfolding in the society around you, so you can be what you want to be, given the real world constraints that life puts on us all. You’ll see that by using certain mental tools and insights, you can learn and do more—far more—than you might have ever dreamed."book's web site: Mindshift - Barbara Oakley

Saturday, March 11, 2017

Microsoft MakeCode"Microsoft MakeCode provides a programming experience based around Blocks and JavaScript (technically, a subset of TypeScript). The experience has a built-in progression from simple block-based editor, through in-browser text editor with robust auto-completion and auto-fixing, all the way to a professional integrated development environment (Visual Studio Code)."

Tuesday, March 07, 2017

Ambitious Alibaba takes aim at the kings of cloud computing | TechCrunch"NASDAQ-listed Amazon’s market cap exceeds $400 billion, while Alibaba is valued at $250 billion according to its NYSE share price....Two years ago, Alibaba decided to take the cloud part of its business more seriously and expand outside of China with a billion dollar investment in Aliyun (now known as Alibaba Cloud in English). At the time, Alibaba Cloud’s president Simon Hu made a bold prediction, telling Reuters, “Our goal is to overtake Amazon in four years, whether that’s in customers, technology, or worldwide scale.”...Alibaba is sixth in the world behind AWS, Microsoft, Google, IBM and Salesforce in infrastructure, platform and hosted private cloud services"

Original Azure Command Line Interface (xplat CLI) is based on node.js (JavaScript).
New version is based on Python. Apparently Linux admins prefer Python.
Or just use PowerShell (core :)

Azure CLI 2.0 | Azure Friday | Channel 9"Azure CLI 2.0 is optimized for managing and administering Azure resources from the command line, and for building automation scripts that work against the Azure Resource Manager."

"ION uses a binary encoding to make it faster to read and write, more compact, and to make it possible to embed binary data. ION's encoding is described in the text ION Encoding.""IAP (Internet Application Protocol) network protocol is designed to replace HTTP for the many use cases where HTTP is inappropriate. Why HTTP2 and WebSocekts are not enough."

"With the Internet of Things (IoT) we will have a lot more different devices communicating via the internet. Different devices send and receive different types of data, and have different communication patterns. A new network protocol should take that into account. Similarly the next generation of the web, being it Web 3.0 or Web 4.0 (or whatever name it gets), will most likely add new types of data and communication patterns to the ones already existing."

Summary of the Amazon S3 Service Disruption in the Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) Region"an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process. Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended... Removing a significant portion of the capacity caused each of these systems to require a full restart. While these subsystems were being restarted, S3 was unable to service requests..."

Thursday, March 02, 2017

"Here are some numbers that give a sense of how large scale this computation was:Nine quintillion (9,223,372,036,854,775,808) SHA1 computations in total6,500 years of CPU computation to complete the attack first phase110 years of GPU computation to complete the second phase"
Chrome and Firefox do not accept HTTPS based on SHA1 anymore.